Brotherhood
of the Bomb:The
Tangled Lives and Loyalties of Robert Oppenheimer, Ernest Lawrence,
and Edward Teller (Henry
Holt and Co. 2002)

Brotherhood
of the Bomb
is now available in a paperback edition from Owl Books, a division
of Henry Holt and Company.

The claim in Brotherhood
of the Bomb that Robert Oppenheimer was, with Haakon Chevalier,
a member of a secret or so-called closed unit of the Communist Party’s
professional section in Berkeley, from 1938 to 1942, has, unsurprisingly,
generated some controversy. (See, for example, “Book Contends
Chief of A-Bomb Team Was Once a Communist,” 9/9/02, New York
Times; and “Oppenheimer Bombshell,” 4/24/04, San Francisco
Chronicle). Robert Oppenheimer denied ever being a member of the Communist
Party, or belonging to “a Communist Party unit.”

Lost in this controversy, unfortunately, is the real significance
of the book’s discovery--which is not the fact of Oppenheimer’s
membership in such a group, but the effect that his denials had upon
his subsequent life. If, as I contend, Robert Oppenheimer was indeed
close enough to the Party before the war to need to hide that fact
when Groves chose him to head the bomb project in 1942, this gave
Oppie something he continued to have to hide for the rest of his life--including,
most notably, during his 1954 loyalty hearing. It also may help to
explain why Oppenheimer remained strangely mute while in exile on
causes, like nuclear disarmament, that he passionately believed in.

Equally lost in the controversy is a generally overlooked fact that
has direct bearing upon Oppenheimer’s place in history: that
he was both a communist before the war, and an American patriot then
and after. Gordon Griffiths, who served as liaison between Berkeley’s
rank-and-file Party and the closed unit to which Oppenheimer and Chevalier
belonged, got it exactly right when he wrote in his unpublished memoir:
“But the time has come to set the record straight, and to put
the question as it should have been put: not whether [Oppenheimer]
had or had not been a member of the Communist Party, but whether such
membership should, in itself, constitute an impediment to his service
in a position of trust.”

Portions of Griffiths’ memoir, and other evidence concerning
Oppenheimer’s membership in this closed unit, are posted on
the “Documents” section of
this website.